Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday May 05, 2013 @12:43PM
from the your-superhero-name-is-conspicuous-man dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The students at Royal College of Art in London have developed masks that can increase your sight and hearing senses. They allow you to choose one conversation or one visual among a cluster of sounds and visuals, then hear or see the one which you want to. There are two masks developed by them: Eidos Vision and Eidos Audio. Eidos Audio allows a wearer to hear a specific conversation in a crowd and could be developed as a hearing aid and help ADHD sufferers. Eidos Vision improves vision allowing wearer to see 'time trails' similar to a timelapse photography."

Hearing aides amplify all noises in the area. This is supposed to be selective, amplifying the selected conversation and damping out the rest. That's the new part, but to make that effective, you need to replace the current sensory input with the input from these.

It also can't work well due to the ongoing gain control problems with speech amplification. Digitally managed gain control has been an amazing cluster !@#$ and a complete waste of processing power. You can't twitch the gain up and down to maximize distant speech without smearing "plosive" sounds, and you can't do it well with the limited digital sampling rates available in most low power A-D conversion systems.

Of course, there is a solution to this. Simply amplify the analog signal and clip it when it's too loud. Keep the digital systems out of it, their 1-bit minimum signals throw out low level signals that matter for low frequency sounds. This approach was documented by Robert Licklider in the early 1960's. But it's not amenable to digital processing because A-D conversion throws out all the low level signals and the zero-crossing analog data that contains the actual information. And it's got prior art, over 50 years old, so there are no patents available. So instead we get these sucky, smeared A-D based overprocessed gain systems that have already thrown out most of the important information.

The human auditory system can absolutely use timing difference to determine the location of sound. We are sensitive to interaural time differences as small as 10 microseconds [nih.gov]. If you don't have access to that article, just search anywhere for "ITD JND" (stands for interural time difference just-noticeable-difference"

Your first paragraph appears to describe beamforming [wikipedia.org], methods of which have numerous patents.

Yeah, I don't know the patent landscape too intimately well (IANAL), but it woudln't surprise me if several annoying patents on obvious uses of beamforming were holding back some creative minds from commercializing cool things.

There are other approaches to focusing on sounds from specific directions and sounds with specific features. Looking at how the human auditory system does it [wikipedia.org] is (broadly) my current line of research. With the standard multi-mic approaches, you need at least as many mics as independent

Many hearing aids have directional mics. They're not always considered useful, because if you fix the directionality people miss sounds from other locations that they occasionally care about, and attempts at adaptive algorithms usually suck. Progress is being made, though. Some researchers are even trying to track the wearer's eye movements, or even use brain imaging (like EEG) to detect what location a user is trying to attend to.

We already have glasses and hearing aides that don't make you look like a complete dork.

If you watch the video in the article you'll see that these devices are much more sophisticated than normal glasses and hearing aids.

The sight mask appears to allow you to see the trail of motion (allowing a football manager to see where his players have moved from) and the hearing mask allow you to focus on a specific sound (allow a child with ADHD to focus on useful sounds). Although these designs do look odd they are probably not the final designs and aren't supposed to worn all the time.

I was dissapointed in the audio specs. A mic and a DSP/Noise filter. I was hoping for a phased array of microphones that could be focusted on a single sound source to isolate a single speaker in a crowd.

Based on the demo, this appears to be a digital way to experience taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Timelapse trails behind movement? Sharp sound focus? Are we creating an electronic ability to simulate pharmacological effects?

I was thinking the reverse -- you could program it to give a normal user an experience similar to one an autistic person experiences by default. This might help them understand, and possibly even accommodate, the sufferers.